The reason for the "Stanford" speculation is the unexplainable connection between intellectual acumen and table tennis. My Ex-wife's best friend is/was a lecturer on astrophysics at Cal Tech; an iconoclastic Greek who rolled his own cigarettes and loved to debate the validity of religion against his unshakable atheism.
I recall that aside from holding court on the nature of matter and photons with respect to Black Holes (something I studied quite thoroughly in a different life) and pontificating on the infallibility of Greek Socialism (sneer), his only real hobby and exercise was . . . . . playing ping pong. My Ex considered him the smartest person she had ever met and me the dumbest - which I now attribute to a lack of ping pong skill and incorrect selection of mate.
Despite this, we got along famously; although before he moved to Switzerland I was never able to get him to acknowledge that because matter cannot be compressed infinitely, Black Holes must have an inter-dimensional release valve - but that another story.
Even stranger, a longtime member of my local health club was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I asked - kidding and sure he'd never heard of him - if he had ever met Arthur C. Clarke.
"Oh, you mean Arthur, the writer and scientist?"
Uh . . . . yeah," I said.
"I played ping pong with him at the recreation center nearly every day," he said brightly, "until his legs were too weak."
Sure enough, this random guy was my hero's ping pong partner for several years. Not 3-dimensional chess, but ping pong.
There must be something I'm missing. When I was a child, my parents sent me to Stanford Coaching Camp - a way to get rid of me for three weeks during the summer to learn the fine points of every imaginable sport from coaches at the university.
All the kids, age ranges from 8 to 16, were bunked at Toyon Hall on campus. My second summer (1969), the university decided to turn the camp (an expensive one) into a social experiment by awarding a large number of scholarships to underprivileged kids from East Palo Alto - a dangerous war zone at the time.
By the end of the first week, the camp became a mess of racial tensions, fights and theft. The little kids (like me) had never been exposed to an 11 year-old with experience fighting with actual weapons, let alone teenagers on a first name basis with the guards at Juvenile Hall. It was terrifying because all the counselors (Stanford students) were in completely over their heads; candy asses like me slept with one eye open.
The one exception- aside from during actual sports activities - was the ping pong table, the unofficial activity of choice for Stanford students. For reasons that remain a mystery, that corner of the main hall was a DMZ with everybody invariably playing nice and waiting their turn. There must be some sort of neurological benefit to this game because even "I hate your guts and hope you die of cancer rivals" like Tiger Woods and Phil managed to play with paddles in a reasonably civil manner during the Ryder Cup.
It is strange that the ping pong table in Toyon Hall is clearer in my memory than Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon - which we all watched on an old B&W TV in the main hall. I still stink at ping pong, but nevertheless associate it with fairly high intelligence.
That was my last year at Stanford Coaching Camp and for the next three Julys, I was off to Billy Casper Golf Camp in San Diego and never looked back. There was a ping pong table in the dorms at UCSD too, but I never played once.